Indisputable Honor and Questionable Honor

I chose the short 5-letter term “honor” as the common denominator in the titles of all three of my Captain McBee novels. From what I’ve read, all wars seethe with honor, as brave soldiers cast aside actions that would preserve their lives, to instead do things that hasten their deaths.

 Last Friday was 9-11, America’s 21^st century Pearl Harbor. Flags flew at half-mast all over the country. On this fourteenth anniversary, I only read one article about the day, but it was a story of absolutely indisputable honor. 

 The short version: Like Pearl Harbor, our military was caught with our pants down on 9-11. There were NO Air Force jets armed and ready to take off from any air field around Washington, DC. to defend our national capital from a surprise air attack. We had lots of radar, but no planes on the runaway, "locked and loaded," ready for a fast take-off to meet an unexpected threat.

 There were two F-16’s with fuel to fly, but with no ammunition or missiles loaded. That would take time, and word came in that a fourth high-jacked jet airliner was headed towards Washington. The pilots of the two F-16’s already knew of the attacks on the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon.

 These two unarmed jet fighters would be our only on-the-spot first-responders. An Air Force National Guard colonel and a young Lieutenant who were the pilots of the two F-16’s quickly put on their flying gear. Before they climbed into their respective jets, knowing their planes' only weapons were the planes themselves, the colonel said to the lieutenant, “I’ll take the cockpit.” She replied, “I’ll take the tail.” 

 That’s it. They took off with the indisputably honorable intent to kamikaze into a jet airliner full of innocents to prevent it from crashing into a target in Washington, DC.

 I hope you caught that I wrote that the lieutenant pilot was a “she.” A petite young blonde in her early twenties fresh out of Air Force flight school, one of America's first generation of female fighter pilots, coolly telling her CO, “I got the tail.”

 To the credit of the American spirit and in their own act of indisputable honor, the civilian passengers on the last high-jacked plane solved their own problem, hastening their own deaths by doing so, by crashing the plane into the Pennsylvania countryside. The lieutenant and colonel didn’t have to give what President Lincoln dubbed in his Gettysburg address, “their last full measure” of honor. A handful of other patriots beat them to it. 

 It would be nice to think that all soldiers acted with indisputable honor, but we're all human, so that doesn't always happen. To offset the valor of the two F-16 pilots and the passengers of the fourth airliner on 9-11, here’s a Civil War story I first read this past weekend.

Below is a report of an interview printed in the Houston Post newspaper in 1909, forty-seven years after the Second Battle of Manassas,  which was fought just outside Washington, DC. My thanks to Joe Owen for posting a piece of the article  on Facebook, then sending me the a transcript of the entire thing.

 Private Lawrence Daffan (1845-1907) of the Fourth Texas Infantry was interviewed by his daughter Katie Daffan some 40 years after the battle of Second Manassas (Bull Run) that was fought on August 30, 1862.

 She prefaces her record of the interview with this paragraph, which as a Civil War addict and novelist always looking for the personal perspective, makes me drool wishing I could have been there.

 “I have heard my father and his comrades, in our home, many times renew the record of Hood’s Texas brigade, when animated, spirited discussions would ensue.  Though each was present, in the flesh, upon the battlefield, each an ardent participant, there were sometimes as many opinions as there were voices.”

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in that home during one of those discussions among the veterans.

 Here’s an excerpt of Lawrence Daffan’s recollections of the great battle which he experienced as a 17-year-old teenage private.

 "We rallied at Young’s branch. I looked up the hill which we had descended and the hill was red with uniforms of the Zouaves. They were from New York.

We ascended the hill out of Young’s branch, charged a battery of six guns, supported by a line of Pennsylvania infantry. This battery was near enough to use on us grape shot and canister.

 As we came near to it one of the guns was pointed directly at my company and lanyard strung. Our captain commanded company G to right and left oblique from it. I was on the right and with a few others went into Company H. Company H received a load of canister which killed four or five men.

I was immediately with Lieutenants Jones and Ransom of that company who were both killed right at my feet. I stepped over both of them. Capt Hunter, now living, was also shot down at that time. Most of the company were my schoolmates.

This last shot threw smoke and dust all over me, and the shot whizzed on both sides of me. Lieutenant Jones was shot in the head and feet, but I was not touched. When the smoke cleared away we had their guns, and they were so hot I couldn’t bear my hands on them. I then fired one shot at this retreating infantry which the rest of the brigade had been engaged with.

This wound up that day’s engagement for us, except the Fifth Texas. As their regiment and their colors were carried about five miles after the retreating enemy.”

 Sounds pretty brave and honorable, doesn’t it. But…

 Private Daffan flat out said that his captain saw just one cannon aimed right at his company and they were close enough for the cannon to be firing the highly dreaded grapeshot or canister -- both being cannon-sized loads of buckshot or golf ball-sized steel balls. Extremely deadly and greatly feared by infantry on the attack.

 So the company captain ordered his men to march at a diagonal (oblique) which would put his men behind the soldiers in the companies to either side of his company. He made the order for his men to essentially use the soldiers in the companies marching next to his in the regiment’s battleline as human shields. He could have had his company lie down or kneel to lessen the size of his men as targets, or he could have just ignored the deadly incoming cannon fire.

 Daffan went on to tell his daughter that five men in the company that shielded him died from the single cannon blast, including two lieutenants, who would have been in the rear of their company formation to keep faltering men going forward, but in front of Daffan, since he says he stepped over their bodies.

 In my way of thinking the unnamed captain of Company G hardly chose an honorable action for his men. Instead, he reeacted to the threat with very questionable honor. Quite a contrast to the 9-11 pilots.

In fact, if the commanders of the companies next to Co. G were aware of what happened, I’m surprised the Co. G captain was not called out to a duel or maybe even a court-marshal for the order he gave his men to move behind the companies to either side of them.Not all soldiers are heroes, not all officers give honorable commands in the heat of battle. Not all patriots wear military uniforms, as the firemen and EMS first responders at the Twin Towers demonstrated. Many patriots were no uniform at all, as the passengers on the fourth high-jacked airliner showed the world. Yet, we are indeed all God’s children, usually doing the best we can.  And on this Monday morning a few days past the anniversary of the tragedies and sacrifices of 9-11, it’s still a good day to say, “God Bless America.”